why the writers felt so lazy as to just rehash surface beats from Star Trek II. Instead of taking important stuff (Like the depth surrounding getting old!), they just took a bunch of famous lines and used them in increasingly cheesy ways.

I'm not sure why people are so fixated on 4 or 5 lines, rather than the rest of the movie. It's like 2 minutes vs 130.

If I disinter your meaning correctly, you found the drama around Kirk's "age" dilemma to be the heart of TWOK. I felt that this movie looked at exactly the same thing from the opposite side.

In TWOK, Kirk has lost the Enterprise. When circumstances hand her back to him he's had a crisis of confidence and is making mistakes. He has experience on his side but is feeling "old". Then when they face the ultimate enemy, Kirk's native smarts and Kirkian "I don't like to lose" attitude kicks in and he snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. But not without great cost.

In STID, Kirk has lost the Enterprise. When circumstances hand her back to him he's had a crisis of confidence and is making mistakes. He has youth on his side but is feeling his inexperience. Then when they face the ultimate enemy, Kirk's native smarts and Kirkian "I don't like to lose" attitude kicks in and he snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. But not without great cost.

When Kirk says his "logical" sacrifice is "what you would have done", there's this distant echo to a future that will never be. When Spock says his outsmarting Khan by giving him what he wanted is what Kirk would have done, there is an additional acknowledgement that they actually understand each other better than they thought they did -- again resonating with future echoes of a future that, at that moment, will never be. I found it to be really, gut-wrenchingly sad (even though it was obvious this wasn't the final gambit).

I admit, that on first viewing I too was distracted by the repeated lines. It takes you out of the emotion of the scene, something you never quite recover in repeated viewings. But I can see that there is a dramatic symmetry that they were trying to achieve, and to a large extent, that worked beautifully for me. While TWOK is a slow, thoughtful, steady build, like a pulse, STID is an adrenaline-charged, enthusiastic roller-coaster -- but again, that suits the contrast of considered experience over youthful vigour.

The more you see the film, the more you appreciate the effort and heart this young cast is putting into telling this story from the other end of a legendary journey.